The Features module is a must when developing Drupal sites to ensure you keep as much configuration as possible in code as well as to help facilitate sharing configuration between developers and pushing updates from development to staging or live deployments.

I love the Features module but it has also nearly brought me to tears when using it in the real world. This presentation will go over how the Features & Strongarm modules were used for a complex Drupal site to save configuration for:

• content types (cck)
• views
• panels (panels & panels everywhere)
• contexts
• imagecache
• taxonomy
• menus
• rules
• permissions
• roles
• conditional fields
• selected variables (using strongarm)

Some things we will explore include:

• Why you want to use features
• The process of creating a feature module
• What you can and cannot save in a feature module
• What you can save but should NOT save in a feature module
• How to push updates from development to staging
• How to update features using drush
• * Changing a feature module's code directly (with CAUTION)
• * Review of hooks from features module

* if time permits

Originally, we were hoping to break this session up into 2 parts to go into more detail but there have been a ton of excellent sessions proposed so this session will be kept as just ONE session. I will try to get into some of the more advanced items if there is time.

The presentation is available below and on: http://www.kristen.org/content/features-module-presentation-badcamp-2011

Slides: 

BADCamp2011_Features_Presentation.ppt